Ballet Stopped by Stalin Moves Again

On Thursday, and for almost a week thereafter, American Ballet Theatre is fielding something rich and strange: “The Bright Stream,” a comic ballet about a Soviet collective farm. Stalin’s project of collectivization—the seizure and consolidation of what had been individually owned farms—resulted in a famine that killed millions of his people in the nineteen-thirties. But the artists who created the original “Bright Stream” in 1935 didn’t know about that yet, and their ballet features a dog on a bike, a man in a tutu, and a switched-identity love plot straight out of “The Marriage of Figaro.” The ballet’s hero, Pyotr, a rather goofy agriculture student, sets out to commit a little adultery and ends up wooing his own wife, Zina, by mistake. In the end, he decides that he likes Zina best, and furthermore, in the words of A.B.T.’s program notes, that she is a first-class worker. A farm-wide celebration ensues.

Soon after its première, “The Bright Stream” was snatched off the stage, on Stalin’s orders. For almost seventy years, it was forgotten. Then, in 2003, the Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky put it back together for the Bolshoi Ballet. (Ratmansky has since become A.B.T.’s resident choreographer, and he brought the piece with him.) He used the 1935 libretto and music. The original steps were not extant, so he created new ones. His dances, as always, are thick with pattern and action, but still readable—and also fresh, sharp, surprising. The music, widely unknown until the ballet was revived, is by Shostakovich. Actually, it may have been to rescue the great man’s score that Ratmansky hunted down this old, curious ballet.

Photograph: Asaf and Sulamith Messerer in a nineteen-thirties production of “The Bright Stream.”

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998.